


used to be on fire.

by katarama



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Blood, Explosives, Friends to Lovers, Gansey On Fire, Jealousy, M/M, References to Ronan's father's death, Underage Drinking, that's the fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-01
Updated: 2020-04-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:53:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23421247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katarama/pseuds/katarama
Summary: Gansey knew how to set things on fire.  It drove Ronan crazy that, now that it was all Ronan wanted to do, Gansey seemed to have packed away the part of himself that remembered how.
Relationships: Richard Gansey III/Ronan Lynch
Comments: 6
Kudos: 46





	used to be on fire.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rjosettes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rjosettes/gifts), [fempynchinsky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fempynchinsky/gifts).



> Happy Anniversary to Theo, who is a terrible enabler.

When Ronan stood in the driveway of his home, flies gathering around the spot where the tire iron struck his father’s skull, congealed blood coating the bottom of his boots, his life became a story of ‘before’ and ‘after’.

At least everyone was eager to tell it that way. If he got a dollar for every time Declan started a sentence with steel in his eyes, his fists clenched in anticipation, “ _If Dad were here_ ,” (fill in the blank, _you wouldn’t be behaving like this_ , _you wouldn’t be acting out_ , you’d be a good little boy and not a monster, as if their dad ever taught any of them to be good), then half the money now sitting in their dad’s estate would already be gone. 

He would have at least thought Declan would have known better, because it wasn’t like Ronan didn’t get into trouble before. It just used to end with blood staining their nice Sunday shirts a whole lot less.

Ronan’s teachers made it perfectly clear that they saw a distinct before and after, too, once Ronan decided that everything was death and blood, anyway, and that he wasn’t going to waste the time he had left sitting in a desk and pretending he gave a shit about the stupid fucking fancy finishing school. 

Gansey, though. Gansey tried to be quiet about it, like Ronan wouldn’t notice. He made excuses for Ronan. ‘ _He’s just having a hard time, since..._ ,’ Ronan overheard Gansey tell Whelk when Ronan bothered to show up to Latin one day, Gansey’s voice trailing off. Like he had to be delicate about it. Like Whelk gave two shits about what kind of trouble Ronan was having. 

‘ _He used to be different, before_ ,’ Gansey said to Adam, his voice low but carrying, echoing through Monmouth. Ronan thought he would be over hearing things like that, by now. He thought it would be dulled with time. It somehow stung even more, confided to Adam when Gansey thought Ronan couldn’t hear. It sounded an explanation and a problem, set down in front of Adam to solve. Adam responded noncommittally, like it was definitely not his problem and definitely something he’d heard before. Probably from Gansey, on another night when Gansey was feeling nostalgic. Was feeling hopeful that Adam could solve Ronan like one of their stupid academic ley line mysteries, like this was something that could be pieced together with time and research.

Ronan knew he was probably being unfair. Ronan did not care. Ronan did not feel like giving anyone the benefit of the doubt when he was angry and tired and sick of fucking everything. 

Ronan spent that night with his hand clenched around the neck of a bottle of cheap liquor and the morning with the bathroom tile digging into his knees, Gansey looking pained and far more sympathetic than Ronan deserved.

* * *

The thing that was the worst about the before and after bullshit was not that it wasn’t true, but that Ronan thought it ignored half the picture. Sure, maybe he did shave his head, because staring back at his dad’s face framed by his dad’s hair in the mirror was slowly killing him inside. Sure, maybe he did blow $900 dollars on a tattoo that was all his dreams bared on his back, because he wanted to piss Declan off, and, more quietly, because if he had to live with his nightmares, then everyone else should, too. Sure, maybe he drank too much sometimes, and maybe he had gotten good at street racing because he had a little too much practice, and maybe he found his way to Kavinsky’s substance parties sometimes, and maybe he woke up one night with a gash in his wrist and yet again more blood, because his life was just one bloody nightmare after another, with nothing on his lips other than “I’m sorry.” 

Acting like it only changed him was ignoring half the reason he wanted to punch something on a daily fucking basis.

Adam had showed up in their lives not long after, so it was easy to blame him, at first. Gansey was delighted by him, even as Adam braced himself for a fight any time Gansey lifted his hand to help Adam. Gansey and Adam spent hours and hours together, bouncing ideas back and forth, half-sentences interrupted, ‘of course the ley lines and Glendower are connected,’ ‘but how do you know they connect-,’ ‘it has to be here, you aren’t considering that-’

It made Ronan’s stomach sour. He was positive Adam didn’t even believe in magic, from the way his brow furrowed, his tone careful and measured as he asked Gansey questions, even as Gansey lit up at the chance to explain himself.

Adam didn’t believe in magic because he didn’t know magic. Gansey knew magic but didn’t have the sense to be afraid.

Ronan lived with it every night, lived with the scars on his wrists and the way his breath caught, his body frozen in place as the sound of buzzing grew closer and closer. 

Gansey didn’t know to be afraid of magic and he didn’t know to be afraid of Ronan, because Ronan spent every waking second (and every dreaming one, too) making sure Gansey didn’t have a reason to be. 

Being afraid _for_ Ronan, however, was a new quality that showed up in this new Gansey. Adam’s Gansey, Ronan derisively called him in his head, at first. He was almost worse than the Gansey that showed up at his mother’s political fundraisers, except that Ronan knew that D.C. Gansey would always be the worst Gansey, because it was the Gansey that was the least Gansey, was the Gansey with every single interesting quality buffed and polished out. Adam’s Gansey was still Gansey, just. With new and terrible habits, which included looking sadly disapproving at Ronan instead of doing fucking anything, and quietly telling Ronan that they need to talk about him skipping school.

This Gansey was a sad, buttoned up copy of the Gansey that got so restless that he drove aimlessly with Ronan around the edges of town in his loud orange camaro. That took one look at Monmouth, an abandoned warehouse whose shattered windows revealed piles of rusty scrap metal and sharp edges, looked Ronan in the eyes, grinned big and broad, and asked, “Do you want it, too?” This was a ghost of the Gansey that helped Ronan set the shit they hauled out on fire at the back of the vacant lot, something wild dancing in Gansey’s eyes that only disappeared when it was time to sweet talk their way out of trouble.

Gansey knew how to set things on fire. It drove Ronan crazy that, now that it was all Ronan wanted to do, Gansey seemed to have packed away the part of himself that remembered how.

Ronan knew that it wasn’t all Adam. Ronan knew that because some of this started appearing at the beginning of the After, before Adam fixed up the Pig and earned Gansey’s eternal respect. Ronan also knew that there were layers to the way his blood ran hot watching Adam draw out parts of Gansey that Ronan didn’t, and that at least two thirds of those layers were thinly veiled jealousy, because it had always been Ronan and Gansey against the world, and now it was Adam-Gansey-Ronan, and it wasn’t the same.

Adam wasn’t even that bad, some of the time. He goaded Ronan, and when all Ronan wanted half the time was an excuse to pick a fight, it was honestly a relief to have someone around who didn’t feel like pulling punches. 

It’s just that he wished Gansey would do that sometimes, would quit treading so fucking carefully. It isn’t like he and Gansey don’t fight. They do. It’s just that when Gansey used to tell Ronan he was being a dickhead, it came with both fondness and firmness, with a certainty that if he told Ronan once, Ronan would fall into line, because Gansey told him to, and that was all either of them needed.

Ronan lets Adam stay because Gansey likes Adam, and, at the end of the day, they both know that Ronan will always give when it comes to something Gansey really wants.

Ronan mostly stops wanting to boil Adam alive because Adam seems to understand better than anyone that sometimes concern feels like pity, and that sometimes pity is enough to make bleeding knuckles sound appealing.

Adam’s Gansey isn’t Ronan’s Gansey, but the tension inside Ronan eases with time as he carefully tucks away every moment that lights his best friend up, that reassures him that Adam’s Gansey is still unmistakably Gansey. Just a different Gansey, one that Ronan has to relearn.

* * *

There are two things Ronan likes best about K.

One thing is that K does not give two shits about any before and after. K does not care about whatever shit drove Ronan to racing or to drinking on any given day. K does not care about what is going on in Ronan’s head. K drags Ronan kicking and screaming out of his head and into the moment he’s in, the rush of adrenaline and the sound of tires screeching and the smell of gasoline and melting plastic. K doesn’t have an edge that isn’t sharp, that isn’t finding ways to make Ronan react. He’s easy with the pills and easier with his fists, and it’s everything terrible for Ronan and everything Ronan desperately craves rolled into one human disaster. K understands Ronan in a visceral, unsettling way.

The other thing is that Gansey hates K, more than Ronan has ever seen Gansey hate anyone.

“Stay away from him,” Gansey says, and it’s an order, not a question, and if Ronan were even slightly weaker, or stronger, he isn’t sure which, that would be the end of it. But he isn’t, so it isn’t, and, for a while, Gansey doesn’t say another word, and he doesn’t either. 

It doesn’t stop Ronan from noticing, though, the way Gansey’s jaw clenches when they see Kavinsky at Nino’s, or when he shouts for Ronan across the quad, flipping Ronan off and grinning, all teeth, _see you on the streets_. When K hands over copies of Ronan’s bracelets, he stares straight at Gansey, as if to ask if Gansey has the guts to do anything about it.

When they come home to model Henrietta crushed and their place fucked up, unmistakable fake IDs littering the floor, Gansey decides it's time to do something about it. Ronan can’t help but look at Gansey, Ronan’s heart beating fast at the way Gansey’s eyes blaze.

Everything about the night is a rush of electricity, Ronan aware of everything at once. Gansey, getting out of the car. K, watching them approach. The smell of burning and weed, the feel of the bass from the Mitsubishi shaking the ground, the sounds of a car crash nearly drowned out by the way Ronan’s pulse is beating in his ears from the way Gansey looks, the way Gansey is looking at him. Ronan lays K out on the hood of his Mitsubishi and decks him, holds up red knuckles, and it feels good. K calls him Gansey’s dog, like that is a taunt, and it isn’t, because Ronan doesn’t disagree, and neither does Gansey, and it feels good. He watches Gansey take hold of a Molotov cocktail, confident and sure and just as on fire as the homemade bomb in his hand as he lets it loose, and Ronan feels good. He feels the weight of the bottle in his hands, the smell of burning fabric, and he hurls it at the Mitsubishi, and for a second it feels wrong, but then it feels like a release, like a choice to let go of everything, like there is no before, just a now, and it feels like everything he needed.

On the drive home, they roll the windows down, the rush of the night air crystallizing the feeling in Ronan’s chest, the wildness and freedom pulsing through his veins, the steady drumbeat in his chest.

“Dream me the world,” Gansey says, and it’s a request and an order and a promise rolled into one, and Ronan would give anything for this night to keep going, just him and his Gansey and the world he will dream just for them.

* * *

They don’t have words. They don’t always need them, because they are Ronan and Gansey and they were Ronan and Gansey and they will always be Ronan and Gansey, and even if not every Gansey is Ronan’s Gansey, every Ronan is Gansey’s Ronan. 

The hours bleed away into night, and Ronan isn’t sleeping, and Gansey isn’t either, because they both know how it feels to close their eyes, certain they will never open them again, and because neither of them has felt this alive in years, anyway, and closing their eyes would be giving it up. And they should both be tired, should both be exhausted, but Ronan is conscious of every breath in his lungs, of the way every wrinkle in Gansey’s bed sheets presses against his skin, and he can feel the way Gansey’s eyes rest on him. It drives something hungry inside him that he always knew was buried there, that he’d always shoved down deep. He knew from the start that he was always laid out for Gansey, all there for Gansey to devour if Gansey quit being too fucking polite for two seconds and just _took_.

There isn’t anything polite in either of them that night. Gansey’s hands are on the back of his neck and then on his thighs, and it’s a clear line in the sand, _you are mine and you are not his_ , his mouth on Ronan’s throat, claiming him in a way that is visceral and overt. Ronan knew the Gansey who used to do these things, with girls, the Gansey that showed up at the Barns with red marks tucked neatly under the collar of his school uniform. It has been so long since he’s seen this Gansey that he had almost forgotten he existed. Gansey tastes like mint and feels like burning and Ronan wants everything with him and he wants with everything in him.

He is Gansey’s Ronan and Gansey is Ronan’s Gansey, and the world feels like it is on fire.

* * *

The morning light comes, and Gansey leaves, and Ronan needs to do something tremendously fucking stupid, because Gansey is in D.C., which means that Gansey isn’t Gansey.

He spends every night with K and he learns how to dream Gansey the world.

It will be ready and waiting for them when Gansey gets back.

**Author's Note:**

> On tumblr [here](http://sleepy-skittles.tumblr.com). I'm new in town, but hoping to chill here for a while.


End file.
